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Ed il mio bacio sciogliera il silenzio che ti fa mia!

6 September 2007 21:50

Tonight I mostly installed Centos 5 upon dedicated servers in America, for a guy based in Germany. Sometimes people do pay me for work which is nice - this job paid for a small stirling engine :)

Yesterday I mostly implemented a web interface for controlling spam via a proxy server.

Several people seemed interested, so I'll explain what I've done:

  • Coded several qpsmtpd plugins for different anti-spam mechanisms on a per-domain basis.
    • Because the stock server only supports global plugins.
  • Coded a web interface for users to manage the settings on their domain:
    • Virus scanning.
    • Greylisting.
    • DNSBL.
    • Resolvable from hosts.
    • Reverse DNS

The only part that is missing is the final plugin integration, and some glue to propogate some of the GUI settings to the mail server - since adding a new domain is currently 50% GUI and 50% manual.

Each of the plugins supports whitelisting of addresses or domains, and there is a fair amount of logging detail - some is missing which I need to resolve.

Once that is done and the code is running upon my live server I'm happy to let people use it if they have a spare/non-critical domain they can expirement with...

The next thing to do would be to hook in spam assassin, spambayes, etc, on a per-domain basis with "training" addresses..

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You're not too technical, just ugly, gross ugly

7 May 2008 21:50

Well a brief post about what I've been up to over the past few days.

An alioth project was created for the maintainance of the bash-completion package. I spent about 40 minutes yesterday committing fixes to some of the low-lying fruit.

I suspect I'll do a little more of that, and then back off. I only started looking at the package because there was a request-for-help bug filed against it. It works well enough for me with some small local additions

The big decision for the bash-completion project is how to go forwards from the current situation where the project is basically a large monolithic script. Ideally the openssh-client package should contain the completion for ssh, scp, etc..

Making that transition will be hard. But interesting.

In other news I submitted a couple of "make-work" patches to the QPSMTPD SMTP proxy - just tidying up a minor cosmetic issues. I'm starting to get to the point where I understand the internals pretty well now, which is a good thing!

I love working on QPSMTPD. It rocks. It is basically the core of my antispam service and a real delight to code for. I cannot overemphasise that enough - some projects are just so obviously coded properly. Hard to replicate, easy to recognise...

I've been working on my own pre-connection system which is a little more specialied; making use of the Class::Pluggable library - packaged for Debian by Sarah.

(The world -> Pre-Connection/Load-Balancing Proxy -> QPSMTPD -> Exim4. No fragility there then ;)

Finally I made a tweak to the Debian Planet configuration. If you have Javascript disabled you'll no longer see the "Show Author"/"Hide Author" links. This is great for people who use Lynx, Links, or other minimal browsers.

TODO:

I'm still waiting for the creation of the javascript project to be setup so that I can work on importing my jQuery package.

I still need to sit down and work through the Apache2 bugs I identified as being simple to fix. I've got it building from SVN now though; so progress is being made!

Finally this weekend I need to sit down and find the time to answer Steve's "Team Questionnaire". Leave it any longer and it'll never get answered. Sigh.

ObQuote: Shooting Fish

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Father... father, the sleeper has awakened!

10 September 2008 21:50

To solve performance problems I've now started to switch my SMTP servers from using the "forkserver" version of qpsmtpd to using the "prefork" version.

Under testing qpsmtpd-prefork performed significantly better than the qpsmtpd-forkserver for handling incoming SMTP connections.

The loadavg of one machine has dropped from a constant 2.xx to 0.4x!

I'd love to see what the asynchronous server would behave like, but that would require re-writing all my plugins to work in an asynchronous manner which would be a significant undertaking.

(It would be nice if the qpsmtpd package available to Debian would allow you to choose between the two version of the server - I will file a wishlist bug.)

ObQuote: Dune

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Dirty. Dangerous. Your kind of people.

16 October 2008 21:50

Screen Fork?

There are times when I think of forking. Mostly sanity returns very quickly, though

Still GNU Screen is one program that I use almost constantly, and it seems to work at a glacial pace.

The Debian package has a lot of open bugs against it. Some trivial, some annoying, and some with patches.

Making the program GNU/Linux only would simplify a lot of things. But then again would that be a legitimate reason to fork it?

Me? I'd just like to see some additional primitives.

More QPSMTPD

I've come up with a nice simple qpsmtpd plugin to do spamgourmet-like setup.

This means I can have email addresses:

  • steve.3.count@steve.org.uk
    • Allows only three mails to this address.
  • steve.date.20-10-2008@steve.org.uk
    • Allows only mail to be sent here prior to Oct 20th.

Plugin code will be in the usual place in the next day or two..

ObFilm: xXx

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My hovercraft is full of eels.

28 June 2009 21:50

Recently I've been seeing an awful lot more bounced mail addressed to my domains, to the extent that I now wonder whether they are deliberate "attacks".

Over the past four or five years I'd expect to receive one joe-job attack every six months. Over the past two that's risen to once every two months. For the past two months its been once a week.

I run several domains on my Xen guest, and most of those domains rarely have mail received, so there are only a few localparts. (A "localpart" is the bit before the @ sign in an email address.)

My main domain is steve.org.uk and unfortunately this was historically setup with "catchall" behaviour. I used that wildcard expansion pretty seriously so I had localparts such as "slashdot.org", "lwn.net", etc. Over time I've stopped making up new addresses and just stuck with "steve".

Still I'd never quite gotten round to enumerating all valid localparts, instead I tried to mitigate against these rare bounce storms with various simple hacks. For example the following procmail recipe to file away bounces:

#  Bounces
#
:0:
*(Return-Path:).*(<>)
.Automated.bounces/

However this doesn't work as well as it used to - too many idiots people are using challenge/response systems so I'll receive a reply to a mail I didn't send which doesn't look like a bounce (ie. There is a real envelope sender.)

In short blocking bounces by detecting an empty envelope sender is not a complete strategy these days. I started down the heuristic path blocking mail to "unlikely" localparts via patterns such as:

[0-9]@        DENY  Localparts never end in digits
,             DENY  Localparts never contain a comma
|             DENY  Localparts never contain PIPES.
^([^a-zA-Z])  DENY  Localparts start with a-z/A-Z
"             DENY  Quotes are never used in accounts on this system:
'             DENY  Quotes are never used in accounts on this system:

That was actually a simple change to make, via the addition of a new QPSMTPD plugin and it managed to block a lot of the bounceback spam - regardless of the envelope sender. For example:

IP:84.45.254.18    sender:<> Recipient:treacherously9@steve.org.uk
IP:203.202.253.252 sender:<> Recipient:envoyz0@steve.org.uk

Blocking "unlikely" localparts wasn't perfect, but without implementing BATV or enumerating valid localparts there wasn't too much else that I could do. In terms of numbers yesterday I blocked just over 18,500 messages with these six rules.

I also wrote a couple of cronjobs to look at the contents of the Automated.bonces folder so that I could add per-user rejections on the specific addresses being received - with some whitelisting.

(For example if I received 20+ bounces to fluffy32qp@steve.org.uk within the space of ten minutes I'd drop further mails to that address automatically.)

Anyway enough is enough. Today I woke up to just over 40,000 replies to mails I didn't send. I've now scanned my mail directories for all the email addresses I've ever used and will now only accept mail destined to those localparts.

Thankfully it turned out that since 1999 (when steve.org.uk was registered) I've only used about 150 distinct localparts, and many of those are now obsolete. So hopefully I'll now have less of a problem.

It seems to be paying off already:

62.193.234.95   wpc0505.host7x24.com  <>  virtual_rcpt_ok
    901     mail to subtotalingxa@steve.org.uk not accepted here (#5.1.1)

65.99.223.234   cobra.compukey.net    <>  virtual_rcpt_ok
     901     mail to suctionsw@steve.org.uk not accepted here (#5.1.1)

207.44.156.81   box19.fuitadnet.com   <>   virtual_rcpt_ok
     901     mail to reappearcum@steve.org.uk not accepted here (#5.1.1)

In the future this means I could still get flooded with bounces, but there will be two outcomes:

  • The bounces will not hit valid localparts and will be dropped easily, quickly, and cheaply.
  • The bounces will hit valid localparts:
    • Real bounces will end up in Automated.bounces/
    • Challenge/Response things will still reach me. Sigh.

Still this is progress and I can steal some ideas from this great spam filtering service (ahem) to improve the handling of those! (I explicitly chose to use a similar but different system for my personal mails. Even though my support system is on another box I want to avoid problems where failures requiring human intervention are swallowed in the same way that the original one was. Those kind of reasons mandate a similar system but different implementation.)

I guess I could publish some of the qpsmtpd plugins I use locally virtual_rcpt_ok, virtual_badusers, rcpt_pattern_test, etc. Then again most people who do funky things with qpsmtpd will have plenty of choice already.

ObFilm: Monty Python's Flying Circus. (OK technically not a film. Sums up my mood though.)

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Some domains just don't learn

5 February 2012 21:50

For the past few years the anti-spam system I run has been based on a simplified version of something I previously ran commercially.

Although the code is similar in intent there were both explicit feature removals, and simplifications made.

Last month I re-implimented domain-blacklisting - because a single company keeps ignoring requests to remove me.

So LinkedIn.com if you're reading this:

  • I've never had an account on your servers.
  • I find your junk mail annoying.
  • I suspect I'll join your site/service when hell freezes over.

I've also implemented TLD-blacklisting which has been useful.

TLD-blacklisting in my world is not about blocking mail from foo@bar.ph (whether in the envelope sender, or the from: header), instead it is about matching the reverse DNS of the connecting client.

If I recieve a connection from 1.2.3.4 and the reverse DNS of that IP address matches, say, /\.sa$/i then I default to denying it.

My real list is longer, and handled via files:

steve@steve:~$ ls /srv/_global_/blacklisted/tld/ -C
ar  br  cn  eg  hr  in  kr  lv  mn  np  ph  ro  sg  tg  ua  ve  zw
aw  cc  cy  gm  hu  is  kz  ma  my  nu  pk  rs  sk  th  ug  vn
be  ch  cz  gr  id  it  lk  md  mz  nz  pl  ru  su  tr  uy  ws
bg  cl  ec  hk  il  ke  lt  mk  no  om  pt  sa  sy  tw  uz  za

On average I'm rejecting about 2500 messagse a day at SMTP-time, and 30 messages, or so, hit my SPAM folder after being filtered with CRM114 after being accepted for delivery. (They are largely from @hotmail and @yahoo, along with random compromised machines. The amount of times I see a single mail from a host with RDNS mysql.example.org is staggering.).

(Still looking forward to the development of Haraka, a node.js version of qpsmtpd.)

ObQuote: "Mr. Mystery Guest? Are you still there? " - Die Hard

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BlogSpam.net repository cleanup, and email-changes.

3 December 2017 21:50

I've shuffled around all the repositories which are associated with the blogspam service, such that they're all in the same place and refer to each other correctly:

Otherwise I've done a bit of tidying up on virtual machines, and I'm just about to drop the use of qpsmtpd for handling my email. I've used the (perl-based) qpsmtpd project for many years, and documented how my system works in a "book":

I'll be switching to pure exim4-based setup later today, and we'll see what that does. So far today I've received over five thousand spam emails:

  steve@ssh /spam/today $ find . -type f | wc -l
  5731

Looking more closely though over half of these rejections are "dictionary attacks", so they're not SPAM I'd see if I dropped the qpsmtpd-layer. Here's a sample log entry (for a mail that was both rejected at SMTP-time by qpsmtpd and archived to disc in case of error):

   {"from":"<clzzgiadqb@ics.uci.edu>",
    "helo":"adrian-monk-v3.ics.uci.edu",
    "reason":"Mail for juha not accepted at steve.fi",
    "filename":"1512284907.P26574M119173Q0.ssh.steve.org.uk.steve.fi",
    "subject":"Viagra Professional. Beyond compare. Buy at our shop.",
    "ip":"2a00:6d40:60:814e::1",
    "message-id":"<p65NxDXNOo1b.cdD3s73osVDDQ@ics.uci.edu>",
    "recipient":"juha@steve.fi",
    "host":"Unknown"}

I suspect that with procmail piping to crm114, and a beefed up spam-checking configuration for exim4 I'll not see a significant difference and I'll have removed something non-standard. For what it is worth over 75% of the remaining junk which was rejected at SMTP-time has been rejected via DNS-blacklists. So again exim4 will take care of that for me.

If it turns out that I'm getting inundated with junk-mail I'll revert this, but I suspect that it'll all be fine.

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